There was a thing you could do with cat /dev/random into aplay, and get some fun "Music" but you needed some other parameters to get anything other than brown noise.
Can't vouch for any other distro, but aplay is alive and well on Mint. The package that contains it — alsa-utils — seems to be a core dependency for Cinnamon, even.
So basically, your example runs fine on my machine, screechy sounds and everything.